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Improving text selection in CSS Regions – take 2

It’s been three months already since our last update on the work our partners at Igalia contributed to improve text selection for pages that use CSS Regions. In the meanwhile, a good amount of progress has been made, both in terms of clarifying the expected behavior and actual implementation work in WebKit and Blink.

If you’re in a hurry, here’s why this matters: Currently, the way text selection on the web is specified, lacks the flexibility needed to make it behave intuitively in modern web design. Not only that, but CSS features (like Flexbox or Regions) that break the direct mapping between elements in the document and the actual content rendered on the screen may yield highly unexpected results for the end-user. Thus, discussing the possible standardization solutions and implementing them is important for creating a more usable web.

You can head over to Javier’s and Rego’s blogposts for all the nitty-gritty details (and a smooth video ) of the fixes needed in WebKit. Hopefully they will make their way into the WebKit trunk, providing pages that use CSS Regions better and more intuitive text selection behavior.